TikTok Has Been Sued by the US State of Indiana
The parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, has been charged with breaking consumer protection laws by the state’s Attorney General, Todd Rokita.
On Wednesday, two separate lawsuits were initiated. The first one asserts that the app presents sensitive material to users who are under the age of 18.
In the second case, Mr. Rokita also says that TikTok doesn’t say that the Chinese government might be able to get important customer information.
According to the court filings, “TikTok is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” [Citation needed] “As long as it is legal for TikTok to lie and mislead Indiana customers about the threats to their data, those users and their privacy are easy victims.”
According to the lawsuit, the app’s algorithm promotes a lot of information that shouldn’t be available, such as “depictions of alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs; sexual content, nudity, and suggestive themes; and strong profanity.”
It further asserts that it deceives young users by having age ratings of 12 and above on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
Because of its “unfair and deceptive conduct,” the state of Indiana is going to court to get an injunction against the company’s tactics and to demand civil fines against the business.
According to Mr. Rokita, these cases are the first ones filed against ByteDance by a state in the United States. The requests for comments made by the BBC have not been met with a response from ByteDance or TikTok.
The revelation of the cases follows the drafting of legislation to prohibit TikTok in a number of other jurisdictions in the United States. In Texas, South Dakota, and South Carolina, it is now illegal to use TikTok on devices owned or run by the state government.
Last month, the head of the FBI said that TikTok is a threat to national security in a statement.
According to statements made by its director Chris Wray before the House Committee on Homeland Security in the United States, Chinese legislation basically mandates businesses to “perform whatever the government wants them to in terms of providing information or operating as a tool of the Chinese government.”
Executives from TikTok and people from the Biden administration have been talking for a few months about a national security deal that will protect the data of the service’s hundreds of millions of American users.
TikTok is also dealing with legal issues in other jurisdictions. The social media corporation might be subject to a fine of £27 million ($29 million) in the United Kingdom for failing to protect the privacy of youngsters while they are using the site.